1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to methods and systems for indicating invisible contents of workspace.
2. Description of Related Art
“Sensemaking” is a process of gathering, understanding, and using the information for a purpose. A sensemaker performing sensemaking gathers information, identifies and extracts portions of the information, organizes the portions for efficient use, and incorporates the portion of the information in a work product with structures.
Sensemaking tasks on information that requires a large space to work, or a workspace, for example, using a computer display and the like, raise problems. If the computer system attempts to display the entire workspace, the information becomes too small and thus illegible. On the other hand, if the system attempts to display a section of the information in detail, then the sensemaker cannot view the other sections that are outside of the view. The sensemaker often chooses the latter for legibility. In such situations, the sensemaker still desires to be aware of information in the unviewable, or peripheral, space.
Conventional techniques used to solve problems in peripheral awareness include “overview-and-detail” techniques and “fisheye” techniques.
FIG. 1 shows a typical example of a workspace. A workspace 100 includes objects 110-140 and may be divided into two spaces; viewed space, or focus space 150, which is to be displayed on a display device and the like, and a populated space, or peripheral space 160, which is generally not visible on the display device, but is depicted for a better understanding of this invention. The overview-and-detail display duplicates the representation of overview of the peripheral space 160 usually in a reduced magnification, while showing detailed, or normal view of the focus space 150. In contrast, one fisheye technique generally presents a single coherent view in which the focus space 150 and the peripheral space 160 appear at the same time, but the peripheral space 160 may be distorted.
Another fisheye technique is a continuous fisheye. The continuous fisheye uses continuous distortion to smoothly vary from allocating more space to the focus and less space to the context. Alternatively, a step fisheye divides the display into regions of varying detail. Typically, one region in the step fisheye provides a full-scale view of some part of the space while the other regions display context at a reduced level of detail.
For linear documents, one-dimensional scrollbars provide a full overview of the document. As the underlying document's length changes, the scrollbar must adapt by manipulating the (theoretical) horizontal and vertical zoom factors independently to coordinate with the underlying document's aspect ratio changes. Since the typical one-dimensional scrollbar does not display document content, the scroll bar does not suffer from the distortion that would otherwise be inevitable with such a technique. In contrast, scrollbars for two-dimensional documents act as coupled partial overviews rather than views of the entire space. The scrollbars do not need to control the horizontal and vertical zoom factors independently; rather, the scrollbars display linearly independent strips of the underlying space.
Scrollbars provide two main insights into the relationship of the current view to the total space. Such insights include the relative position of the current view in the entire space and the size of the current view relative to the size of the entire space. Through tight coupling to the main workspace display, scrollbars also provide three standard navigational aids: the scrollbar thumb can be manipulated to affect corresponding changes in the view; the scrollbar trough can be clicked to jump to a particular location in the space through coarse fixed increments; and/or the scrollbar buttons can be clicked to move in fine fixed increments through the space.
One modification to such scrollbars is representing document content in the scrollbar trough. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,339,391 and 5,479,600 to Wroblewski et al. disclose such an approach. Wroblewski teaches techniques for using the scrollbar to linear documents rather than two-dimensional spaces. The techniques are particularly suited for linear documents where the scrollbar represents an overview of the entire space and allows the visualization to remain relatively stable. When these techniques are extended to two dimensions (i.e., both vertical and horizontal directions) where the scrollbars represent linear strips of the workspace, the visualization in one axis must vary with a thumb movement of the alternate axis.